The anatomy of a joke: best quick dissection of the disgusting injustice done to Tim Hunt http://wp.me/p3pSkE-8n

Mark Steyn paints an unrosy picture of the future of Europe:

"I want to go to Germany". If everyone goes to Germany, there will be no Germany to go to. But Angela Merkel has given a generation of young men from the Mahgreb to the Hindu Kush their battle cry. And the lesson of this month is that no one will stop them.

Oh, don't get me wrong. There are real refugees in Europe, and there will be more: Ask a Jew in Toulouse, a gay in Amsterdam, an uncovered woman in Rosengard...

Apparently, if you wan to distribute drugs without blowback, you should become a DEA agent.

In the "floggings will continue until the data gives us the results we want" category: most US historical climate network data is estimated or adjusted.

Also provides a disproportionate amount of data in the global sense: the US is about 6.6% of the world, but provides 39% of the data for modelers.

Not sure of the back story to this; but, the actions seem to be unbelievable:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11890521/Puppy-taken-from-homeless-man-by-animal-rights-activists.html

They come across as the French version of PETA assholes.

They even seem to be bigots to boot by making the claim that the homeless guy was "a Roma" using the dog for begging. As if those "Gypsies" are always up to no good!

P.S. sorry, there is an auto-play video on the link.

Here you go, Darth...

Thanks for linking to my article on Tim Hunt.
I've enjoyed checking out your site!

A.J.

You know Rad, most climate change deniers are nut bars.

Problem is there are a few quite reasonable questions that climate change truthers are equally as nutty in refusing to answer.

1. Climate models use to portend a coming Ice Age, now it is global warming, but not a single on has ever been accurate. Given every model has been wrong why are we expected to believe the models?

2. Why do they have to massage the data why cant they leave the temperatures at what it was recorded as? Government agencies have been caught far to many time altering the data for us to ignore it.

3. If it is such a cause for concern why dont government officials and scientists telecommute rather than fly to multiple conferences a year to circle jerk and talk to each other about the dangers of global warming.

4. Why insist that raising the global temp a few degrees will kill all life on the planet when there is plently of evidence that world temps have been even higher than the worst any global warming model has suggested and life carried on?

lujlp:
#1, 3, 4: You're absolutely right.

#2: It is necessary to adjust the historical data because the collection methods were inconsistent, so data from different stations cannot just be added together to get an average. E.g., they want measurements from midnight and noon for the average, but for most of the stations it's only been a few years since glass thermometers were replaced with electronic ones and linked to automated data collection so the midnight measurements could be easily made. Before then, someone had to get up at midnight and go out and read the thermometer. That usually didn't happen; the majority of stations were manned by volunteers, and even the professional ones rarely had the budget for a night shift. So the TOBS adjustment takes the actual measurements and times and _extrapolates_ the temperatures at noon and midnight.

Other adjustments:
--Thermometers may be off. When you are trying to detect trends of around 0.01 degree, _all_ thermometers are off. Glass ones just can't be read that precisely, not even in the lab that calibrates them, and electronic temperature sensors are not that accurate. If the same thermometer was used under the same conditions for 150 years, the thermometer calibration would cancel out in calculating the _changes_ in temperature, but everything else also changed:
--Urban heat island effects: cities run a few degrees warmer than rural locations, and over the century-plus that is needed to really see a trend, cities have often grown up around a temperature measurement station.
--Local heat effects: Thermometers used for these databases have been observed to be located near asphalt parking lots, attached to heated buildings, or even near the hot end of an air-conditioning system. (The response to that in the US: They stopped publishing the locations of the thermometers.)
--Discontinuities: Thermometers are replaced. The structures shielding from the sun them are replaced (the original ones were wooden ones somewhat like birdhouses, and over a century those will rot away.) Stations are moved. Stationkeepers change. Stations go out of service temporarily or forever, and are replaced with different stations, in a different location with a different thermometer and sun shield, read by different people.

So, except for a modern thermometer network that was created only in 2005 and satellite data that runs from 1979 (and still needed a correction when the satellites were replaced), all temperature data needs adjustments. The problem is who is doing the adjustments and how they do it. The people in charge seem to be idealogues. They rarely give even a glimpse of their methods, or even of the unadjusted data. In the UK, they've _lost_ the unadjusted data. Overall, they seem much more like a secretive priesthood than a group of objective scientists.

What we know from sources other than this priesthood:
--There was a cycle of ice ages and warm "interglacial periods" for millions of years, which rather abruptly terminated 8-10,000 years ago, allowing the development of agriculture. (I'm sitting in a spot that would be under 2 miles of ice if the cycle had continued.) Alternate hypothesis: the widespread clearing of forests for agriculture caused global warming that aborted the next ice age.
--1,000 years ago the climate appears to have been unusually warm, at least in Europe. This helped Europe emerge from the "dark ages". Scandinavians turned from a religion that predicted the eventual triumph of Ice Giants to Christianity, and became much less likely to murder you, rape your women, and haul your stuff back home.
--Between 1300 and 1500 AD, temperatures dropped far enough to hurt crop yields, wine growing moved from England to France and Portugal, people were snowed in earlier and longer, etc. There's a dispute over whether this Little Ice Age was world-wide, but I've heard of no historical records showing that other parts of the world were exempt from this climate change, so either it was world-wide, or coincidentally it only hit nations that were keeping written records.
--In the southwest of North America, the Anasazi civilization collapsed around the beginning of the Little Ice Age in Europe. Drought and crop failures seem to be involved, but it's disputable whether it was a climate shift resulting in a civil war over the last scraps of food, or just another of the droughts typical of that reason, combined with leaders who failed to stockpile enough food reserves, and then started wars to distract people from their failures.
--The Little Ice Age ended in the 1800's, just about the time thermometers became available for people that wanted to log temperature readings. So the first part of the temperature record, starting about 1850, definitely shows an increase, but that says nothing about long term trends.
--Greenland was marginally capable of supporting farmers in 1,000 AD. It could no longer do that about 1,600 AD. No farmers have returned to it yet.
--The 1930's were very hot. Temperatures dropped slightly over the next 40 years, and alarmists predicted an ice age in the 1970's. Then temperatures rose abruptly from 1979-1998. Since then, they haven't changed much.
--Only a fanatic would think that the much-adjusted temperature data is accurate enough to tell us whether any recent year was warmer than 1939.